Science Gifts: Telescopes, Etc.
As longtime readers know, one of my spare-time occupations is amateur astronomy. I often get asked by friends and colleagues for telescope recommendations, so (just as I did last year), I'd like to provide some, along with some background on the whole topic..
The key thing to remember with a telescope is that other things being equal, aperture wins. More aperture means that you will be able to see more objects and more details. It's only fair to note that not all amateur astronomers agree with this, or about which kind of scope is best. As you'll see, larger apertures involve some compromises. And keep in mind that while ...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Science Gifts Source Type: blogs
Eye of the Beholder Stuff
I'm sure that many readers here will be interested to hear that (according to some outfit called CareerBliss.com) the happiest company in America to work for is. . .Pfizer. Probably makes you happy just to hear about it, doesn't it? (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Worst Biotech CEO Time
I always enjoy this one: time to vote on Adam Feuerstein's "Worst Biotech CEO" awards for this year. There are, as is so often the case, some real stinkers on the list. Tough choices await. (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
Tiny Details, Not So Tiny
Chemjobber has a good post on a set of papers from Pfizer's process chemists. They're preparing filibuvir, and a key step along the way is a Dieckmann cyclization. Well, no problem, say the folks who've never run one of these things - just hit the diester compound with some base, right?
But which base? The example in CJ's post is a good one to show how much variation you can get in these things. As it turned out, LiHMDS was the base of choice, much better than NaHMDS or KHMDS. Potassium t-butoxide was just awful. But the hexamethyldisilazide was even much better than LDA, and those two are normally pretty close. But there...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 12, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
David Cameron, The Press, Alzheimer's, and Hope
One should be cheering the news that Great Britain will double funding for Alzheimer's and dementia research. But there's something odd about the way it's being presented, at least to my eyes. Here's a story from the Guardian that might illustrate what I mean:
The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, said he hoped the dementia summit would have the same effect as the G8 summit in Gleneagles on HIV/Aids in 2005.
"Today should be an optimistic day," he told BBC Breakfast. "Tony Blair had the G8 summit in Gleneagles in 2005 on HIV/Aids and actually that did turn out in retrospect to be a turning point in the battle against Aids.
...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 11, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Alzheimer ' s Disease Source Type: blogs
Best Chem-Blog Posts of 2013
Here's a roundup of the top chem-blog posts of the year, as picked by Nature's Sceptical Chymist blog. I made the list, but a lot of other good stuff did, too - have a look. Edit - link fixed now - sorry! (Source: In the Pipeline)
Source: In the Pipeline - December 11, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
Down With the Luxury Journals?
Nobel laureate Randy Schekman has stirred up a lot of controversy with his public declaration that he will send no more manuscripts to Nature, Science, Cell and such "luxury journals".
. . .The prevailing structures of personal reputation and career advancement mean the biggest rewards often follow the flashiest work, not the best. Those of us who follow these incentives are being entirely rational – I have followed them myself – but we do not always best serve our profession's interests, let alone those of humanity and society.
We all know what distorting incentives have done to finance and banking. The incentives m...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 11, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Scientific Literature Source Type: blogs
Science Gifts: Elements and More
I've mentioned Theodore Gray's book The Elements before as an fine gift for anyone's who's interested in science or chemistry. I have a copy at home, although I don't have the follow-up, the Elements Vault, which apparently also has some chemical samples in it (doubtless of some of the less offensive elements!)
Last year I ordered the companion Elements Jigsaw Puzzle, which I did with the kids during January and February, to produce a three-foot-wide periodic table with information and photographs of each element. I did not miss the opportunity to mention some of the ones that I'd worked with (and I'm soon to add a couple...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 10, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Science Gifts Source Type: blogs
Standards of Proof
Here are some slides from Anthony Nicholls of OpenEye, from his recent presentation here in Cambridge on his problems with molecular dynamics calcuations. Here's his cri du coeur (note: fixed a French typo from the original post there):
. . .as a technique MD has many attractive attributes that have nothing to do with its actual predictive capabilities (it makes great movies, it’s “Physics”, calculations take a long time, it takes skill to do right, “important” people develop it, etc). As I repeatedly mentioned in the talk, I would love MD to be a reliable tool - many of the things modelers try to do would becom...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 10, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: In Silico Source Type: blogs
What Reagents Will You Never Forget?
I've had the chance to use good old elemental bromine this morning, for the first time in several years. I can never see the stuff without thinking of this incident, a memorable part of the first synthetic scheme I ever tried that involved bromine. In the same way, every time I come across thiophenol - which isn't often, fortunately - I'm immediately taken back to this chemistry, which is a reaction I'll never forget either, despite numerous attempts to expunge it from my memory.
So here's a good question for a Monday: what reagents immediately recall something from your chemical past, and why? I'd assume that most workin...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 9, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Life in the Drug Labs Source Type: blogs
Low Energy Records
Pick an empirical formula. Now, what's the most stable compound that fits it? Not an easy question, for sure, and it's the topic of this paper in Angewandte Chemie. Most chemists will immediately realize that the first problem is the sheer number of possibilities, and the second one is figuring out their energies. A nonscientist might think that this is the sort of thing that would have been worked out a long time ago, but that definitely isn't the case. Why think about these things?
What is this “Guinness” molecule isomer search good for? Some astrochemists think in such terms when they look for molecules in interste...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 9, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Chemical News Source Type: blogs
Shop Up Some Gels For the Paper
There have been many accusations over the years of people duplicating and fudging gels in biology papers. The Science-Fraud.org site made quite an impression with some of these, and there are others. But as in so many other fields, manual labor is giving way to software and automation.
Nature News has the story of an Italian company that has come up with an automated way of searching images in scientific papers for duplication. The first scalp has already been claimed, but how bad is the problem?
Now midway through the analysis, he estimates that around one-quarter of the thousands of papers featuring gels that he has an...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 6, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Dark Side Source Type: blogs
Outcomes, Expensive Outcomes
Well, to go along with that recent paper on confounding cell assays, here's a column by John LaMattina on the problem of confounding clinical results. For some years now, the regulatory and development trend has been away from surrogate markers and towards outcome studies. You'd think that lowering LDL would be helpful - is it? You'd think that combining two different mechanisms to lower blood pressure would be a good thing - is it? The only way to answer the questions is by looking at a large number of patients in as close to a real-world setting as possible.
And in many cases, we're finding out that some very reasonabl...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 6, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Clinical Trials Source Type: blogs
Parkinson's From the Environment?
I've been meaning to link to this piece by Lauren Wolf in C&E News on the connections between Parkinson's disease and environmental exposure to mitochondrial toxins. (PDF version available here). Links between environmental toxins and disease are drawn all the time, of course, sometimes with very good reason, but often when there seems to be little evidence. In this case, though, since we have the incontrovertible example of MPTP to work from, things have to be taken seriously. Wolf's article is long, detailed, and covers a lot of ground.
The conclusion seems to be that some people may well be genetically more susceptible...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 5, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: The Central Nervous System Source Type: blogs
Drug Companies In Great Britain: Ease Up, Won't You?
The tension between drug companies and regulatory agencies is constant. It would be there even if no one cared a bit what drugs cost, because you can talk about safety and efficacy without ever mentioning a price. But since we do care about drug prices, and are coming to care more about them with every passing month, the tension is higher than ever. The questions aren't just "Is this drug safe?" or "Is this drug efficacious", or even "Is this drug relatively safe compared to its level of efficacy". You get into the really hard ones like "Is this drug's level of efficacy worth its price?"
Great Britain's NICE is at the for...
Source: In the Pipeline - December 5, 2013 Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs
